Tuesday, William Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, delivered closed-doors testimony to Congress that would have promptly ended any presidency in American history prior to this one. Taylor, a pro's pro who Trump's amateur goons really should not have messed with, made it clear that there was indeed an organized, not-very-secret conspiracy to extort the government of Ukraine in exchange for announcing phony investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and Ukraine's alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.
It was all there — the quid, the pro, the quo, the whole sordid scheme laid out end-to-end and narrated capably by a career foreign service officer who is obviously about 300 times brighter and better than any of the dim bulbs who carried out the extortion scheme. Lawmakers told reporters that there were "audible gasps" of shock during Taylor's opening statement. It's good to know, at least, that on day 1,005 of Donald Trump's corrupt misrule, it is still possible to be made freshly aghast at his contemptible behavior.
In his statement, Taylor says he accepted his May appointment reluctantly, both out of respect for deposed Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and because he had already heard rumors of an out-of-control Rudy Giuliani freelancing American foreign policy totally outside normal channels. He arrived in Kiev to find that new President Volodymyr Zelensky was vigorously pursuing his reform agenda and that "a new Ukraine might finally be breaking from its corrupt post-Soviet past."
Unfortunately, Taylor discovered that, like with anything that Donald Trump has so much as brushed a shoulder against, U.S. policy in Ukraine had been turned into a hash intended to benefit the president directly rather than either the American or Ukrainian people. You should read the gory details yourself, but to sum up: Taylor quickly realized that a cabal including Giuliani, Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, and former Special Representative to Ukraine Kurt Volker were carrying out a demented plan to force Zelensky to announce investigations into Burisma (the company Hunter Biden worked for) as well as the Pizzagate-level fever dream that the Ukrainians were somehow hiding the DNC server that was hacked by Russia in 2016, and that on that server is evidence that it was all a Democratic hoax.
No one, Taylor realized, was even being especially coy about what they were doing. Freshly emboldened by Attorney General William Barr's successful blunting of the Mueller Report, Trump and his minions seemed to believe that they could get away with anything.
Taylor noted that in August of 2019, "I became increasingly concerned that our relationship with Ukraine was being fundamentally undermined by an irregular, informal channel of U.S. policymaking and by the withholding of vital security assistance for domestic political reasons." This, of course, we already knew from Taylor's already-released text messages with Volker and Sondland. But Taylor brought the receipts Trump's idiotic wise guys printed out for him.
https://theweek.com/articles/873611/william-taylors-testimony-should-game-over-trump
It was all there — the quid, the pro, the quo, the whole sordid scheme laid out end-to-end and narrated capably by a career foreign service officer who is obviously about 300 times brighter and better than any of the dim bulbs who carried out the extortion scheme. Lawmakers told reporters that there were "audible gasps" of shock during Taylor's opening statement. It's good to know, at least, that on day 1,005 of Donald Trump's corrupt misrule, it is still possible to be made freshly aghast at his contemptible behavior.
In his statement, Taylor says he accepted his May appointment reluctantly, both out of respect for deposed Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and because he had already heard rumors of an out-of-control Rudy Giuliani freelancing American foreign policy totally outside normal channels. He arrived in Kiev to find that new President Volodymyr Zelensky was vigorously pursuing his reform agenda and that "a new Ukraine might finally be breaking from its corrupt post-Soviet past."
Unfortunately, Taylor discovered that, like with anything that Donald Trump has so much as brushed a shoulder against, U.S. policy in Ukraine had been turned into a hash intended to benefit the president directly rather than either the American or Ukrainian people. You should read the gory details yourself, but to sum up: Taylor quickly realized that a cabal including Giuliani, Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, and former Special Representative to Ukraine Kurt Volker were carrying out a demented plan to force Zelensky to announce investigations into Burisma (the company Hunter Biden worked for) as well as the Pizzagate-level fever dream that the Ukrainians were somehow hiding the DNC server that was hacked by Russia in 2016, and that on that server is evidence that it was all a Democratic hoax.
No one, Taylor realized, was even being especially coy about what they were doing. Freshly emboldened by Attorney General William Barr's successful blunting of the Mueller Report, Trump and his minions seemed to believe that they could get away with anything.
Taylor noted that in August of 2019, "I became increasingly concerned that our relationship with Ukraine was being fundamentally undermined by an irregular, informal channel of U.S. policymaking and by the withholding of vital security assistance for domestic political reasons." This, of course, we already knew from Taylor's already-released text messages with Volker and Sondland. But Taylor brought the receipts Trump's idiotic wise guys printed out for him.
https://theweek.com/articles/873611/william-taylors-testimony-should-game-over-trump
